Frank Bryan, a longtime UVM professor that will retire this year, teaches one of his political science classes on Friday. / EMILY McMANAMY/Free Press

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Free Press Staff

Frank Bryan, a longtime UVM professor that will retire this year, teaches one of his political science classes last week. / EMILY McMANAMY/Free Press

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This state has produced its share of characters with unlikely careers, but Frank Bryan stands apart.

He’s not only a respected professor (the unlikely career, soon to end), but a character who has written plenty about what it means to be, well, a Vermont character. He’s not so easy to pigeonhole, but you might say he’s a salt-of-the-earth intellectual. To describe him as “unpretentious” would be an understatement.

As a political scientist, he knows more about town meeting, which he calls “real democracy,” than anyone else. And he doesn’t want to talk about it, but some people say he’s also a leading exponent of Vermont’s character. Perhaps it takes a character to really know one.

At 72, after 36 years at the University of Vermont, Bryan is retiring. When the current academic year ends, he’ll step down from the John G. McCollough chair in political science and go home to Starksboro to begin a life of idiosyncratic contemplation, speaking, writing, even teaching — all of which he’s already doing. What he’s really looking forward to, though, is running a trap line. For what?

“Muskrats, minks,” he said off-handedly the other day, after finishing a lecture on the effects of the reapportionment that took hold in Vermont in 1965. He was wearing blue jeans and a black undershirt beneath a khaki, short-sleeved shirt. The shirt was buttoned, open at the neck.

“Real Vermont men always keep their shirts buttoned up,” Bryan once wrote with friend Bill Mares. That was in Chapter 2 of their 1983 tour-de-force, “Real Vermonters Don’t Milk Goats.”

“Real Vermonters don’t wear bib overalls,” they wrote. “They don’t tie their sweaters around their necks. They wear hats when it’s cold, even if they have wavy hair.”

The book caught on as the state was undergoing a transformation — waves of “flatlanders” were arriving on the interstates and staying, politics and lifestyles were changing, and the nature of “real Vermonters” was on the mind of everyone except, of course, real Vermonters.

Bryan’s curriculum vitae lists nine pages of academic publications and presentations, followed by a short section, “Books (Humor and general interest)” with six titles. “Goats” was the first. It came out after he’d done enough serious writing to get tenure at UVM. He and Mares got the idea sitting in a Burlington diner.

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“It sold like 50,000, it’s short, there’s cartoons, you can read it in an hour, it came out in October,” Bryan said, “right at the height of the real Vermonter business, just a stroke of luck.”

“We wrote that book in six weeks,” Mares recalled recently. “It became an unexpected best seller. Frank did the lion’s share of the work.”

The “great intellect” in the book, Mares said , was Bryan’s.

That last comment, relayed to Bryan, evoked laughter, an unprintable comment, and then, about the book, “There is no intellect!”

Bryan’s conversation is speckled with salty language. You might say he talks like a farmer — a farmer who knows his grammar and who can discuss democratic theory till the cows come home.

“Frank Bryan is the world’s expert on town meetings — not just today, but ever,” wrote Jane Mansbridge, Adams professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, in an email. “And town meetings are one of America’s greatest contributions to democracy.”

Small town upbringing

Bryan was born in West Stewartstown, N.H., just across from Canaan, where his father was high school principal. So much for the Vermont native thing.

“I’m an imposter, absolutely,” Bryan said, but then pivoted to declare that he’d been conceived in Vermont. “I think I was, unless dad and mom were running around in a car ...”

When Frank was 2, in 1943, his father — a Yale graduate — went off to war in North Africa. His parents divorced after the war, and Bryan’s childhood memories are of a household overseen by his hard-pressed mother in Newbury, about 80 miles down the Connecticut River.

After the divorce, “her life became hard and then brutal,” Bryan wrote in a “My Turn” reminiscence in the Free Press in 2000. “It was tough in those days, a divorced woman in a small town with three little kids. She worked hard. She tried to be a father, too, and mostly failed. We never had a car, and it was a one-store town ...”

“A working girl from Windsor,” he called his mother, and “a Truman Democrat” — the only one in Newbury. In that town she was an outlier, and she kindled his interest in politics.

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“My mother loved politics, but in Vermont the Democrats were going nowhere, and in Newbury especially,” he said. “I can remember that poor woman, and I was seven years old, in 1948, making telephone calls with a wind-up, going through the exchange, to get people to come out and vote for Truman. I didn’t know, and I don’t think she realized, there was no way in hell that Vermont was going to go for Truman anyway.”

He also remembers the 1952 presidential campaign season, when the Newbury grade school decided to do something political and have a parade around town. Republican Dwight Eisenhower, a shoo-in in Vermont, was running against Democrat Adlai Stevenson. Vermont had voted Republican in every presidential election since 1856.

“We all had placards,” Bryan recalled, “and so, I’m the only guy with a Stevenson placard, and I’m going, ‘Please, God, if I get back to that school in one piece, I’ll become a Republican!’”

He had some “awfully good teachers” in the local high school, finished third in a class of seven with an average of “about 72,” and was rejected by the University of Vermont. He got in to St. Michael’s College, though.

“My brother went there and did very well, so they took me,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for that, I’d still be milking cows. I’m serious.”

He took time off to work on a dairy farm. He got married, with a baby on the way. He graduated and spent a couple of years at UVM, where he got a master’s in political science. Then he took his family to the Northeast Kingdom, where he spent a year teaching social studies at Orleans High School.

“I coached the JV basketball team, did the whole routine,” he said. “Hardest job I’ve ever had in my life, but that’s where I learned to teach, honest to God.”

He loved teaching but figured he’d make more if he taught in college, so he headed to the University of Connecticut for a doctoral program. His thesis was a study of Vermont politics beginning with the “Hoff breakthrough” — Phil Hoff, elected in 1963, was the first Democrat elected governor after a long line of Republicans. The dissertation was published by the New England University Press under a title he didn’t like (“Yankee Politics in Rural Vermont,” 1974).

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“It’s the first empirical analysis of Vermont politics, and I’m very proud of it,” he said. “ It was about political change in Vermont.”

His early academic career included stints at St. Michael’s and at Montana State University, but by 1976 he was back in Vermont knocking on UVM’s door. He started as an instructor teaching one course and driving a school bus to make ends meet. As he recalls it, someone died and he picked up another course, then another.

“I applied for a permanent position but it was tough to get,” he said. “They offered it to two other people before they gave it to me ... I was up against Ivy league people. My reputation was as a rowdy, and I had a UConn degree. I was lucky to get hired.”

“My favorite quote from Coolidge is, ‘persistence is everything.’” (“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence,” goes the famous saying of Calvin Coolidge, another product of small-town Vermont. “Talent will not ... Genius will not ... Education will not ... Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”)

“I was persistent,” Bryan said. “I wouldn’t go away.” Working in his favor, too, he believed, was that he was good in the classroom. “I don’t want to sound like a braggart,” he said, “but I can teach. ” His teaching honors at UVM include the Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award, bestowed by the alumni association in 2004.

Vermont changes

Until the mid-’60s, Vermont’s House comprised 246 representatives — one for each town or municipality. (Newbury had one representative. So did Burlington.) After the 1965 reapportionment, 150 representatives were elected from districts based on population.

Bryan’s lecture Wednesday in Poli Sci 123 focused on how — and whether — reapportionment affected the character of the House and the kinds of people who served. He displayed a series of graphs on a screen in front of the classroom showing the numbers and percentages of farmers, lawyers, first-timers, women, Democratic and Republican members, biennium by biennium through the late 1980s, with 1965 as the signal year. Bryan reminded his two dozen students that he’d discussed reapportionment and New England cities in a previous lecture and asked a young man in a back row if he remembered the point Bryan had been making then.

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“Hardly,” the student said.

“Hardly?” Bryan called out. “Jeez. I’m working my ass off, give me a break.” Then he asked him another question and coaxed out an answer.

Bryan spoke without notes and peppered the class with questions, eliciting several prolonged responses and questions in return. At one point he described how he got the data on one of the graphs: by going through legislative manuals and coding legislators by occupation.

“That’s what I did for a couple of decades of my life,” he said. “It cost me a couple of marriages and a lot of crap.” The class tittered. (For the record, Bryan is in his second marriage and has fathered seven children by three women.)

His conclusion was that reapportionment was a catalyst that sped up some of the changes that were taking place in Vermont anyway — such as the decline in the number of farmers, the rise of women and Democrats.

“How much time do we have?” he asked at the end of the period. “None? I’m going to take two more minutes. You can sit here a second.”

Then he talked about Vermont Senate — a virtual control group — where some changes, such as the drop in farmers, paralleled those in the House.

“OK, get out,” he said. Two students approached him questions before they left.

In an interview afterward, he was asked if he ever romanticizes Vermont and its small towns — given his admission that “I’ve always been a Vermont fanatic.”

“That’s a good question,” he said. “I really, truly, watch myself. You can tell from this lecture. The reason I’m a successful political scientist is that I’m an empiricist.”

“‘Yankee Politics’ used cluster bloc analysis — it’s something like factor analysis, before computers — on the Vermont Legislature. And that was only the second or third instance of a political scientist using that technique on legislative behavior, including the Congress.”

His scholarly shtick has been using statistics,“bringing empirical evidence to bear on theoretical paradigms. And I’m still that way ... To me, you have got to have evidence. You cannot just say, Democrats do this, and Republicans do that, unless you have evidence.”

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“The reason I was published in good places had nothing to do with brains,” he said. “It was persistence and bringing all this data to bear.”

Real democracy

With the help of his students, Bryan brought the data to bear on the phenomenon of town meeting in Vermont.

Between 1970 and 1998, they attended and gathered statistics on 1,435 town meetings. Measures of attendance, participation, meeting length, and other variables were tabulated along with those for town size, socioeconomic diversity and so on.

The result was his magnum opus, “Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How it Works,” published in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press.

“The University of Chicago Press!” he exclaimed, nine years later. “It’s not dishonest to say it’s like a basketball player playing in the NBA. It’s always ranked in the top 10 academic presses in the country. And it got great reviews.”

One of the jacket blurbs for the book was by Robert Putnam, Harvard professor of public policy and author of “Bowling Alone,” who said, “I wish I had written this book. It is witty (about Vermont village life) and wise (about everything from Athenian democracy to the ecological fallacy.)”

“Frank Bryan,” Putnam wrote in an email last week, “is widely recognized as the leading expert on town meetings in the world.”

Mansbridge, Putnam’s Harvard colleague, said: “We are all incredibly fortunate that Frank ... could bring the feel and spirit of town meetings together with his massive data collection effort and his political science quantitative skills to produce the definitive book on town meetings. That is a major gift to humankind.”

Political participation — in the form of voting — comes at a cost. You have to take time to go to the polls. And yet, the effect of your single vote is likely to be negligible.

“We’ve been arguing about this for 50 years in political science,” Bryan said. “Why do voters vote when they know they won’t make a difference? That’s the voter paradox.” It was captured famously by Anthony Downs in “An Economic Theory of Democracy” (1957).

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Yet there’s something different about participation at town meeting. Yes, the cost is higher, in the form of more time spent, more paid working hours forgone. But the impact is also greater: Your vote, and your voice in a floor debate, are likely to mean something. That’s why, Bryan said, people are willing to sit for hours, as some do in Starksboro, on hard benches without backs.

“A lot of people are romantic,” he said. “They think people go to town meeting because it’s cute, you can meet your neighbors, chitchat. No! They go to town meeting to make a difference!”

His town-meeting study produced a finding that might seem counter-intuitive, he said, “unless you know small towns.” While researchers elsewhere have repeatedly found that greater political participation is associated with higher socioeconomic status, that was not the case with town meeting, according to Bryan’s data. The meetings tended to draw a cross-section of townspeople.

He calls the town meeting “real democracy” because, while turnout is often low and the discussions often tedious, it still brings together “real people” to make “real decisions” about their own governance. Is it perfect, pure? Of course not.

“There are times at town meeting when I’m sitting and thinking, ‘Please God, make him sit down!’” said Bryan, who has attended at least 70 town meetings over the years. “I’ve taken scholars on Fulbrights from China to town meeting, and their fundamental caveat is that it’s boring. They want it to end! And it is. It can be very boring.”

Your compensation as a participant is that by going to town meeting you can actually have an impact on governance — by making meaningful decisions from the floor on budgets, spending, elective offices and other matters of substance. But across the state that substance is gradually being diluted, and that’s why the institution of town meeting is in trouble.

More and more towns are shifting budgetary and election decisions to daylong secret balloting, and more and more time is occupied by advisory discussions, by oral reports from Montpelier representatives. The meetings are losing what matters most — decision-making that matters.

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“If it continues the way it is,” Bryan said, “it won’t survive another couple of decades.”

'Power to the towns'

Bryan doesn’t want that to happen.

He wears two hats. One is that of the empirical political scientist. The other is that of a citizen who takes a normative stance: Bryan advocates governmental decentralization, of which town meeting is a prime example.

“One of Frank’s virtues is that he is able to combine his genuine passion for a political process such as Vermont town meeting with the willingness and sophistication to study it carefully, impartially, systematically and rigorously,” wrote Alan Wertheimer, a UVM emeritus professor of political science and a former colleague, in an email. “His work shows the way in which the actual process meets and also falls short of its aspirations.”

Bryan calls himself a “communitarian.” What does that mean?

“Power to the towns,” he said, adding that the only way to save town meeting is to “systematically return real decision-making power to the towns. McClaughry and I wrote a book about that.”

He was referring to “The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale” (1989), co-written with John McClaughry, which argued for giving primary governmental functions to clusters of towns, while placing “systemic” responsibility for civil rights and the environment with the central government. Bryan noted that the book got favorable reviews in both liberal and conservative publications.

McClaughry, a policy adviser in the Reagan White House and founder of the Ethan Allen Institute, took issue with an editorial description of Bryan as an “arch conservative.”

“I am here to testify that Frank Bryan is not an arch political conservative, not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld would say,” McClaughry said when he introduced Bryan for a speaking engagement in 2006. “He is a backwoods libertarian, populist decentralist, ox team logger, occasional deer jacker, junk car collector, great speaker, and full time Real Vermonter.”

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Among his colleagues at UVM, Bryan said, he often feels like a political outlier, just as his mother was in Newbury. Some regard him as a Republican. He regards himself, rather, as a “decentralist,” and points out that he voted for Democrat Peter Shumlin, in part because Bryan approves of Shumlin’s stance opposing a shift to a four-year gubernatorial term.

“The four year term further separates the people from their government,” he said. “The best solution to a failing democracy is more democracy.” A two-year term obviates any need for recall elections, he added.

“I would have been a communist in 1917,” Bryan said. “Power to the soviets!” He was referring to village soviet, the Russian analogue to the Vermont town government.

On the subject of town meeting, two things gall him.

One is the misuse of the term “town meeting” to promote various public forums (held by members of Vermont’s congressional delegation, among others) that have nothing to do with a real town meeting. One of the three presidential debates last fall was billed as a “town meeting” format.

The other is occasional commentaries to the effect that town meetings can be personally vicious. In fact that is seldom the case, Bryan said, and Vermont is as civil a state as they come. He’s working on a book about that.

“When you have to walk out of the building to the parking lot with someone,” Bryan said, “ you’re not going to be sassy. We’re much better than the critics say.

“That is not to say that it’s the Norman Rockwell kind of myth. The more you build up the myth, the easier it is to criticize town meeting.

“It’s real. These are real people, wonderful people and jackasses and smart and dumb and lazy (people) ... But out of that comes the best kind of decision you can make.”